Explication of "My Number" and "I had heard it's a fight."

Both "My Number" by Billy Collins and "I had heard it's a fight" by Edwin Denby depict narratives where the speaker is facing the moment before death.
Collins' piece follows a man who is preoccupied with the coming of death. The narrator lists many places and actives that the Grim Reaper could be doing, this repetition proving his obsessive worry, and the poem ends with the metaphorical Grim Reaper arriving at his home. It seems this individual was expecting death in that he asks the Reaper if he had "trouble with the directions?" but still tries to ward off his advances with the final line "as I start talking my way out of this," or cheating death.
Deby's piece focuses on the is the precise moment that you start to feel yourself die. Dying is immediately compared to a "fight" but then narrator's experience was a "sweet thrill" that warned him of the "hell" that was to come. After having this run in with death the speaker reveals that he is an alcoholic who became sober after the sobering experience. He suddenly reverts back to "schoolkid" days where he views the intoxicating liquid as "bad," and refuses it from then on.
Both poems share a metaphorical view of death and both writers personify it. Collins states that he travels about causing morbid ends while Denby claims "it" physically "touched me." Both pieces are mostly light-hearted in tone seen in the colloquial language present and a sense that one can easily barter with death.

How HOD mirrors the Age of Imperialism

Unfortunately, my computer was being particularly belligerent so I decided to compare Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness to, not Apocalypse Now the film, by to the Age of Imperialism. My focus being the 1900s movement of some nations to gain resources by colonizing other nations. The two share various parallels. Firstly, the novella and particular period of time have narrative elements in common. Conrad's piece follows the horrors of early 20th century imperialism in nations such as Africa and the protagonist of this story is a white man that works under the imperialists. Similarly in the Imperialistic Era it was Caucasian patriarchy that ruled over government, society and media so the overarching narrative of the time is the perspective of white men.

Conrad's piece may seem to admonish imperialism, in that Marlow is disapproving and traumatized by it but he still actively participates in it and looks up to it's perpetrators. Marlow has extreme respect, even reverence, for a man (Kurtz) that favors a slogan of "Exterminate all the brutes!" Marlow claims to not see wrong in the natives and finds the assumed cannibals on his ship to be reasonable and hard-working. Marlow is a mirror to the guilty-yet-complacent whites of the Age of Imperialism in that they are witness to or aware of the atrocities being done to the natives yet they are held back by promises of riches or racist attitudes. The public wants to see good in the heroes of their nation, like Marlow desires in Kurtz, and will apologize or ignore anything that is contrary to their forged truth. This brings us back to the white male narrative which takes its roots in author Conrad and the oppressive system that is white supremacy. Conrad writes as a white man having witnessed the tragedy of imperialism but despite his identifying the horror that was this situation he still refuses to see the victims of this (the natives) as human. This is best seen in Marlow's diction surrounding the laborers in that he sees them as subhuman and only human-shaped. The Age of Imperialism came during and served to fuel discriminatory attitudes in the white culture. The common terminology for natives were savages, also utilized in the novella, and imperialists saw them as uncivilized beings in a resource-rich environment which they could easily exploit. Clearly this is mirrored in Heart of Darkess in that the leaders of the Company treat the natives like workhorses and regularly commit violence unto them, with faux justifications in that they need to be taught and are not fully human.

Explication of "My Son the Man"

Sharon Olds’ “My Son the Man,” is the poetic narrative of a parent watching the maturation of his or her son. The narrator talks about the growth of their son as being like “the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains.” This allusion to the famous escape artist implies that the boy is escaping from childhood and the placement of chains is akin to parental attachments holding him back. The speaker recalls a time when the child was very young and they could dress him in his pajamas and easily pick him up. As children become adults they no longer require the constant help of their guardians, and Olds evokes this with the image of the dressing and playing because as her boy grows, as previously mentioned, she can no longer do these things with him. Olds’ character recognizes this change in the line “I cannot imagine him no longer a child, and I know I must get ready, get over my fear of men now my son is going to be one.” This speaker watches their child grow and fears the time when adulthood will take him away from them but in stating “I know I must get ready, get over my fear,” they recognize the necessity of accepting this determined fate. 

The Houdini allusion is again utilized in the final 10 lines when the narrator claims “This was not what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson, snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains, and appeared in my arms.” The emergence of Houdini from his Hudson river escape is compared to the birth of this boy. The closing line tells of the relationship the two share and the way the boy views his growing older. Olds writes “Now he looks at me the way Houdini studied a box to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled,” and claims that the son character see his parent as chains that hold him back and he has expectations to escape them soon. The boy, like Houdini, will “[smile] and let himself be manacled,” and thus he is happy to be bound by his parent’s chains. 

Congo Free State Info

What the world now knows as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was once the Congo Free State and was controlled by Leopold II, a Belgian monarch. Leopold feigned having philanthropic work to do and created his corporate colony in 1885. King Leopold was head of the Association Internationale Africaine and this Congolese area became his private property at the Conference of Berlin. Shortly after, Leopold began his rubber-collecting expedition. Rubber was a cash crop at the time with the surge of usage in tires and other items. He and his team, the Force Publique exploited the Native people so as to produce huge quotas of rubber. The treatment of these local people was extremely brutal and lead to an estimated death toll of nearly half of TCFS. The Force Publique was known for it's horrendous behaviors regarding the Natives where it was routine to torture, flog, rape and/or mutilate the working villagers they oversaw. This genocide can clearly be blamed on the abuses faced by villagers who didn't adhere to the nearly impossible rubber standards of Leopold, as well as starvation, a reduction of births and an increase in disease.

The atrocities that took place in the Congo Free State were what lead to it's demise. Competition with other rubber-harvesting companies, the demands of the public and The British Congo Reform Association all succeeded in ending Leopold's reign. Belgium's parliament annexed the Congo Free State in 1908.

Works Cited: http://cobweb.sfasu.edu/sbradley/Classes/homepages/Congo_Free_State/